by Bryan Gibel
Daily Lobo
About 75 people attended a ceremony Thursday to raise the Mexican flag and address issues of intolerance at UNM.
The ceremony was held because a student took down a Mexican flag from a flagpole outside Scholes Hall on Monday, tore it and took it to the Air Force ROTC office.
The flag, owned by El Centro de la Raza, was raised Sept. 14 in honor of Mexican Independence Day.
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Student Peter Lynch, 30, was charged with criminal damage to property for the vandalism, police said.
The destruction of the flag is a hate crime and reveals a problem at UNM, said Mabel González, president of the Mexican Student Association.
"When we found out about the incident, we felt very insulted," she said. "As the third incident within a short period of time, I think this was an alert to everybody."
González said another incident of a hate crime at UNM was a man accused of attacking more than 20 Indian students in the past several months.
The third incident happened at the football game against NMSU when a man danced around Miss Native UNM, making racially demeaning sounds and gestures, González said.
The Mexican flag was accidentally left up over the weekend, UNM President David Schmidly said at the ceremony.
He said leaving it up was a mistake because no foreign flags are supposed to fly on U.S. soil unless they are below a U.S. flag.
But he said Lynch was wrong to destroy the flag and will be reprimanded by the University for his actions.
Mexican Consul Juan Solana, who attended the ceremony, said he was concerned by what happened, but the University responded well.
"Students were very upset when they contacted me," he said. "However, this was just a single incident, and I've been given a guarantee that it will never happen again."
Julian "Top" Martinez, an Army veteran who attended the ceremony, said the student who destroyed the Mexican flag on Monday wasn't at fault.
"There should not have been a foreign flag flying without the American flag being present," he said. "He actually did the right thing by taking it down. Although, I probably wouldn't have torn it in half."
Martinez went to the ceremony with six veterans.
The University's punishment for the vandalism will be important for preventing acts of intolerance on campus, González said.
"The way the president chooses to reprimand this individual will set the precedent for the future," she said. "I'd like to see more organizations fly their flag in the future, and I want a zero-tolerance policy with regard to incident of intolerance on campus."
